Microsoft Wants to Help You 'Build' Your IT Career
With our laser focus on IT certification, we sometimes don't even notice certification-adjacent developments until they are right beneath our noses. Such is the case this week with the annual Microsoft Build conference that kicked off, er, yesterday. If you, like we, did not have Build front-and-center on your late spring radar, well, there's still time to get involved. A recent post to the Microsoft Learn blog highlights key opportunities for certified professionals to engage in this year's event and up their training and professional development game. For example, Build features Microsoft Learn's so-called Exam Readiness Zone, which offers a laundry list of tools and services via Learn TV to help anyone eyeing a Microsoft certification exam maximize their exam readiness. There's also coverage of IT trends and topics that is specific to different regions of the world. If you don't live in the United States, then there may be areas of focus and discussion that aren't as relevant to you as they are to U.S. attendees. The best thing about Build, especially for anyone who wasn't actively counting down the days until it arrived, is that you can be involved even after the live event ends. You may not benefit from the face-to-face (or virtual-face-to-virtual-face) interactions happening right now, but the aforelinked conference website is your year-round point of access to everything else Build has to offer
How Much Time Should e-Learning Take?
In order for any sort of e-learning to be effective, the person on the learning (as opposed to the teaching) side of the arrangement has to actually deepen their understanding of concepts, pick up new skills, add to their stockpile of knowledge, and so forth. E-learning needs to last long enough for, you know, actual learning to occur. That doesn't mean that learners have unlimited time, of course, or that everyone will need the same window of opportunity to master a skill or concept. This leads us to an interesting tidbit that popped up at the IBM Training and Skills Blog this week. A new post briefly ponders the question of how long learners expect online learning (videos, labs, and so forth) to take. IBM conducted a survey to determine where learners stand and found that roughly half — 48.9 percent — of survey respondents felt that e-learning should last 30 minutes. The next largest group of respondents, 24.4 percent of those surveyed, felt that e-learning should last an hour. So, for what it's worth, nearly 75 percent of those surveyed typically expect to spend either 30 minutes or one hour when they settle in to begin any form of e-learning.
(ISC)2 Continues to Develop Entry-Level Cybersecurity Certification Exam
Cybersecurity professional association (ISC)2 has a towering reputation in the IT certification realm on account of its widely respected cybersecurity certification program. In particular, the Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) and Certified Cloud Security Professional (CCSP) credentials have widespread adoption among cybersecurity professionals. Of late, however, (ISC)2 has been focused on developing an entry-level cybersecurity credential for those new to the profession, and that effort arrived at an important milestone at the end of last week: more than 1,000 individuals have now taken the beta version of the new certification exam. The final exam is still in development, but many individuals have already registered for a training course that will prepare candidates to take and pass the entry-level exam upon its debut. No launch date has been announced for the the yet-to-be-named exam, but those interested can peruse an in-depth exam FAQ online.
Cisco Learning Network Recruits Community Ambassadors
Cisco Learning Network, the certification and training arm of computer networking titan Cisco, relaunched the entire associate tier of its venerable IT certification program in 2020, and is now reshaping its online learning community. A post to the Learning News blog put out a call for community ambassadors as well as announcing the first CLN members to receive the community ambassador designation. This is a welcome development for Cisco certification candidates. Online forums have not, in recent years, been the shining beacon of certification training support that they once were, but they still play an important role in connecting like-minded individuals who can help each other push forward their IT certification efforts.
That's all for this edition of Certification Watch. Please keep your certification news and tips coming to the GoCertify News Editor.
